Mad dash to the finish...

Hey, I know it's been a while since my last post. The time I've spent here so far has flown by, and there are only two weeks left after this one! There is so much to do- I spent a lot of time working on my poster this week. They are due on Monday so they can be printed on large paper, and we are presenting them to the faculty and the public next Friday. I want to finish mine by the end of today. I only need to take a few more pictures and add them to the poster.

I also need to start writing my results. I have edited my introduction a couple times already, but I feel like I need to do a lot of work on my paper soon! Along with writing, I need to take down the growth trial next week and analyze the results. Then I need to run the habitat trial for 2 days too. I have everything ready to go for that trial (for the most part), so I'll be ready to start that on Monday. I have to go down to the beach and haul a bunch of buckets of sand back to the lab to use in the habitat trial, though. That will probably take a while. I am hoping I have enough amphipods and isopods to run the trial so I don't have to go out collecting again.

Last Tuesday we were able to take a cruise on the lab's research vessel. We went out of the habor and along the coast. On our way back into the harbor there was a juvenile gray whale 50 feet from the boat and we saw it surface about 6 times. I took some good videos with my camera.

I should also think about preparing my Powerpoint presentation for the talk we have to do near the end of the program. I am really nervous for that, and I feel like I need to review the primary literature big time so I actually sound like I know what I'm talking about. I don't retain things well after reading them once, so it will take me a while to go over all of the papers I have looked at.

This weekend Aunt Tracy is coming and we are going to go to her friend's house near San Francisco and stay overnight tonight. This weekend should be a lot of fun, but first I need to squeeze in a progressive long run in about an hour. I'm also hoping to take the bus to Sebastopol on Sunday so I can do the 150, 70, and 120m repeats on an actual track.

Never been this tired in my life

This week started off really relaxed, but then picked up a bit. I didn't really have much to do except revise methods and work on my intro a little bit- wasn't feeling very motivated, so I'll have to get a lot of work done on that tomorrow. I sorted out some amphipods from the ulva tank on the back deck, and I have more than enough for my feeding trial. On Friday I was up at 4:50 am to go collect isopods. Luckily another one of the REUs wanted to come help, so that was nice. We didn't get all we needed (many were too big) though.

I wanted to sleep in on Saturday because when I don't have to go into the field I keep waking up around 6:20 for no reason, but my roommate had to go out, so the alarm woke me up at 6:00. On Saturday three of the other REUs and I drove into Sebastopol with the REU director. We walked around and shopped for about 4 hours while she ran some errands. I was really surprised by how many cool shops there were! There was a really awesome used book store (i resisted the urge to buy anything, though) and another regular bookstore. I bought a book with some bracelet patterns at a craft store, and then we walked around Whole Foods, which was cool. Sebastopol is pretty much a rich-hippie town (good people watching). The highlight of the trip for me was the record shop- they had EVERYTHING at great prices and in good condition. I didn't buy anything there because I was worried about records breaking in my suitcase, but i may have to go back. They even had an original Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band tour jacket! The video store in Sebastopol was hilarious because the employees make home videos and rent them out for free, just like the movie "Be Kind, Rewind" with Jack Black. They had a great selection with lots of documentaries and some used DVDs on sale for 6 dollars. We went to the legendary ice cream shop "Screamin' Mimi's" before we left. I had lemon poppyseed ice cream in a waffle cone, and it was amazing.

Today I woke up at 5:30 to go seining in the Harbor and pick up some more isopods. The grad student we were seining with is studying the different species of rock fish in the harbor (copper, yellow tail, etc.), but we saw lots of other species and I learned to identify a bunch of fish. We sae a pipefish, which was pretty insane. I also found a species of isopod that we had never seen before. It was dark red and white and it was the same genus as the ones I am working with not (Idotea). We went to two different sites and seined right along the eelgrass beds. Two of us would drag the net and then bring it back and dump it into a big cooler filled with seawater, and then we sould all drag nets through and sort the fish by species. We released the larger ones and kept only 3 species of rockfish and one species of perch.

The plan for next week is to go out and collect the rest of my isopods tomorrow morning, change water and food for the growth trial, run the feeding trial for two days (will involve weighing a bunch of algae and eelgrass), writing a first draft of my intro and preliminary results, and watching "The Birds" on the big screen in the lecture hall. Busy! Right now I need to go do my long run (waited until now because I took a 3 hour nap today) and get some sleep.

Week 3

Well, the first part of my experiment (the growth trial) has been running for 4 days now, and everything's going great. I have to change the water every day, which takes like an hour each time, but I just listen to music while I'm working, plus I have an excellent view of the ocean from my seawater table. I've only had two isopods die so far, and they were from the control group (starved) so it doesn't really matter.

Today I woke up, went for a short run, and then went to the lab to work on my introduction. I think at least coming up with an outline for my intro will help organize my thoughts and start reviewing my sources, but it's so slow! I have to think for like 5 minutes before I write anything down. I guess it's not really necessary to have an introduction now anyways.

At 10:30 I had a meeting with my mentor and lab professor, which went well. We talked about a couple good papers I found yesterday. I had lunch with about half of the other REUs and then changed water and food for my 120 containers.

We had our second "science communication" module at 3:00 to peer edit our methods sections. I think methods is the easiest part of a paper to write, so it didn't take me long and the things I need to revise won't take that long either. Hopefully I'll be able to do that tomorrow.

Tomorrow I plan to cut and zip-tie another layer of mesh on top of my containers to help control the temperature a little bit more. I think my isopods died because the water in the containers got too warm over the course of all of the sunny days we had last week. Then I'll look around the lab with the hope of finding 70 larger plastic containers to run my habitat preference trial in (although I doubt I'll have much luck with that- people are pretty possessive about their stuff and our lab is so small that I've memorized everything in there already). There is always "more" to do though, so I might end up reading a couple more papers and working on my intor more too.

Friday morning I'll be going out to harvest some more isopods, ulva, and eelgrass for the feeding trial. On Saturday we're all planning on going into Sebastopol to get ice cream at this legendary ice cream shop and then shop a little bit. There is some concert in Occidental that some people are going to, so I may check that out too. It will be interesting finding time to get all of my runs in this week, but it will happen. On Sunday I'm going seining for fish (pulling some nets along in shallow water at a beach) with some grad students from the lab at 6 am, so hopefully I'll get to see some cool stuff.

It's not all work, though- the last couple nights after reading some papers 5 of us have just been talking and relaxing for a couple hours (making origami, watching Planet Earth, etc.), which has been nice. I'm pretty tired from not really sleeping great for the last week, so I'm going to take a nap and go run hills.

Ughh I JUST typed this entire post and then got disconnected from the internet and it got deleted, so I'll be brief. I've been super busy this week. So far I've set up half of my main experiment, read more papers, collected more isopods and amphipods, cleaned a lot of algae and seagrass, written my project proposal, started writing my methods and materials section and the reference section, and had my bike fixed.

Tomorrow I need to find 60 amphipods that are 1 cm in length and then measure exact length to a certain bosy segment under the microscope (after calibrating the scale of the microscope ruler to an actual ruler.

It was pretty fun preparing my seawater table for the experiment, because I got to build grid panels with netting on top to keep out the sun.

Tomorrow night there will be fireworks over the bay, which will be cool. On Sunday we're all going over to the REU director's house for a croquet/4th of July party. No one really feels like mingling and playing croquet for four hours since we all want to get more work done on our projects.

Last night we drove along highway 1 for a while and had a beach dinner and went rock climbing, which was fun.

My goal is to have my main experiment up and running by Sunday night.

Sunny Sunday

Today everyone was really surprised because it wasn't foggy or windy all day! It felt like it was about 60 degrees, so we decided to walk into town today. It's a 3 mile walk, so it took a while, but we found some good souvenirs and salt water taffy. We had to be really careful walking through town because there is no shoulder on Highway 1 there. On the way back we stopped at the Spud Point Crab Company about a mile from our dorms and had clam chowder, which was amazing! We're all really close already, and it's been really awesome getting to know everyone. After we got back we wrote postcards and had dinner. After dinner we sat in the dining hall and told funny stories from college for almost two hours. There is this "fox boy" that goes to one of the intern's colleges, and he wears fox ears and a fox tail 24/7 and runs around campus with his face covered. That was pretty funny, and there were a bunch of other crazy stories too. Tomorrow's going to be a busy day for everyone, because we have our lab meetings to get permission from our research professors to proceed with our projects. I'll just finish writing some postcards tonight and read a little bit.

Experimental Design= pretty much complete

Today I was able to sleep in because we didn't have to collect anything else from the harbor. I walked to the lab with one of the other REU girls around 9:00 and got started sorting through some more ulva and looking for amphipods and isopods. After doing that for 2 hours I spent 2 hours reading papers and trying to finalize ideas for my project.

I also finalized my project idea with my mentor, and I will be comparing habitat preference of one large species of amphipod with the habitat preference of the most abundant isopod species. We went into a lot of detail, but the main idea is that we want to try to find out why the amphipod species is found predominantly in ulva and why the isopod species is found on the surface of eelgrass. There are three different sections of the experiment and we'll get started on the first one on Monday.

First of all, we will need to collect at least 100 more isopods. Nearly all of the amphipods are already living in algae from an experiment that no one has touched in over 6 months. I'm excited to plan out my experiment on paper later tonight. I think the most challenging part will be indentifying the animals as either male, female, or brooding female, as well as trying to find individuals from each species within certain size ranges for different parts of the project.

This weekend should be pretty chill- I'm planning on going out to help my roommate collect a certain species of crab in the intertidal zone tomorrow morning at 6:30, and then I'm going to go with my mentor and maybe a couple other REU students to an oil drilling protest somewhere in the harbor area. On Sunday morning I'll probaby go to the lab and change the water in my isopod and amphipod containers.

Amphipods are everywhere

Hey, today was basically just like yesterday- I collected some more mud and algae samples from the harbor and sorted through them in the lab (found another species!). The water was much colder today. After lunch we went out to the docks to scrape the organic matter off of plastic plates that were hanging down into the water. There were lots of colonial sea squirts and amphipods. We'll sort those samples tomorrow morning in the lab. While we were at the docks we also measured dissolved oxygen content and water temperature and took a water sample to test for chlorophyll levels (part of an ongoing study). Back at the lab I used plastic cuvettes in some machine to get readings for the chlorphyll levels from each site, and I recorded them in this cool waterproof notebook.

Ethics module 1 took place from 3-5 this afternoon. We watched a video on plagiarism and fabrication of data in science and then had a short discussion. Dinner was early, which everyone was thrilled about. I have been looking for amphipods for basically two days straight, so I thought I was seeing amphipods in my pot pie for a second! After dinner I read through another paper and wrote down some possible research questions. I'll discuss what I want to do for my project with my mentor tomorrow morning.

I went for a run around 8:00. I ran almost all the way through the town of Bodega, which was really nice. It was foggy, kind of dark, windy, and kind of cold. I had a nice view of the harbor from the top of a hill in the town, though. And I passed a skunk on the way back- nothing happened, though. I also saw a bunch of endangered white pelicans on the mud flats, which was cool.

Starting to Work

The last couple of days have been pretty busy. Yesterday I had a meeting with all of the grad students in my lab and the professor. His lab focuses mainly on the effects and consequences of species diversity, and many of his students are focusing on seagrass beds. There are 7 graduate students in the lab. Then I met with the professor and my mentor to dicuss my goals for the summer and go over the classes I took last school year (which were very basic).

I separated diatomaceous brown algae from eelgrass with my mentor for an hour and a half, which is involved in her current research. She sampled the seagrass beds at various depths and she wants to determine algal biomass by using a suction sytem and taking the dry weight of the algae.

All of the REU students had lunch together and went on a library tour and a lab tour. The librarian is hilarious- she's really knowledgeable about biology, but she talks way too much and our library info sesssion could have easily been cut in half. No one really cared, but it was just funny. The lab tour was really cool. There are so many tanks, animals, and study areas! Some of the animals we saw on our tour were lobsters, sea stars sea urchins, rock fish, midshipmen (type of fish), salmon, anemones, and abalones.

After the tour I read and summarized a research paper in the library and had an amazing tofu stirfry and carrot cake for dinner ( I'm always so hungry here by the end of the day!). I stayed in the cafeteria and read another paper while drinking 3 different kinds of tea.

Today I went out to the mud flats at 6:00 to collect some ampiphod, seagrass, and ulva samples. I was so happy that my waders didn't have any leaks in them! The water was cold, but the waders were pretty warm and we only went in up to our waists. We had to drag fine mesh nets through the seagrass to collect amphipods (as well as other small invertebrates). We also took samples of only seagrass, a mixture of seagrass and algae, and just algae at each site.

Back at the lab we meticulously sorted through all of our samples. First we put the contents of each bag into a big tub and washed all of the mud and other matter (including living organisms) into the water at the bottom. We poured the water through a sieve and had to distinguish the amphipods from isopods, worms, tiny shells, larval crabs, tiny brittle stars, and snails. We used special tweezers to remove the amphipods and place them in sea water in clear plastic cups. Once we had removed all of the amphipods we found from each sample, I had to look at each one under a microscope and sort them by species. Once I had them sorted, my mentor identified them and told me some key characteristics to look for in each species. We found 6 species of amphipods, which are the main species found in Bodega Harbor.

Finding the amphipods was really hard, since most of them are smaller than half of the diameter of a dime (that's the best comparison I can think of right now). Some of them are larger and some are smaller. The isopods could be really gross if they were large- the biggest one we found was about two inches long. It probably took us around six hours to do all of that. It was fun though, and now I have to start thinking about my research question. Well, I'm going to go back to the dorms now and run.

Looking Forward to June 20th

Hi, I am starting this blog because I was one of eight students chosen for a summer internship at the UC Davis BML in Bodega Bay, California! I will be in California from June 20 to August 14 this summer. I will be working with a faculty mentor to develep and execute a research project while learning more about marine biology. I will also be training for my sophomore year of cross country at Aquinas College while I am in California. I bought a Garmin Forerunner 305 for this purpose. I'm extremely excited to explore opportunities in marine biology and learn what marine scientists really do. I probably will not post again until I arrive at the laboratory.